


Feel The Need

by stephensmat



Series: Cooper's Law [1]
Category: Interstellar (2014)
Genre: Eventual Romance, Exploration, F/M, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 16:10:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11717847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephensmat/pseuds/stephensmat
Summary: It was impossible to comprehend, even for her mind. Humanity being gone was an abstract number about something happening in another galaxy. Cooper being gone she could picture just fine. She was the last human in the universe. Fighting isolation with all the equipment she needed to restart humanity.Then she wasn't alone any more.Spoilers for the movie





	1. The Present

**Author's Note:**

> You'll notice some sections that may not be in sync with the novelization. The reason is that I wrote this before I got the novel. It all fits with the movie, though; so I hope the die-hard fans will be forgiving.

Amelia Brandt was wondering if she should have Cooper's baby.

Plan B was always a long shot. She had a thousand embryos, and instructions on how to start a colony of infants.

And as far as she knew, she was the only human left in the universe.

 _I wish Coop was here._  The thought came back to her more and more often.  _Coop was a father. Coop knew how to protect and raise a child. Coop knew how to..._

She shook it off.

She'd never considered parenthood as a serious option. Okay, that was a lie. She'd thought about it often. As a scientist, she understood the biological imperative inherent in reproduction. It wasn't sexist to say that a woman felt the need for kids stronger than males. She had data to prove that.

But she also had other data. Enough that she'd known the world was ending. Having a child was cruelty in her mind.

But now, here she was with a thousand embryos, and a bunch of incubators... And she had to play mother to a new human race.

But there was an option not covered in her training. All astronauts provided genetic material as part of the program.

She had spoken the truth that day on the ship. Love transcended logic and math. At least, it did for her. Because all her logic and math said that having a child would be cruelty, but... the one time she'd seriously considered committing to motherhood anyway, was when she'd realized how in love she was.

Edmunds had donated, of course. All of them had. NASA had its pick of people for the Lazarus Missions. Wolf was one of the elite astronauts, chosen for physical and mental prowess, just like her. Exactly the kind of pedigree needed for a new human race.

Amelia hadn't made her feelings for Wolf general knowledge. Cooper, the insightful bastard that he was, had spotted it instantly. But what he hadn't known, was that when Edmunds made his little donation, Amelia had quietly moved some numbers around. The fertilized embryo in the test tube she held was the progeny of Wolf Edmunds... and herself.

Nobody had noticed, or cared. It was meant to be random, and Plan B meant the human race was already dead.

"Scary thought." Amelia said aloud. But she didn't feel bad about it, really. It was impossible to comprehend, even for her mind. Humanity being gone was an abstract number about something happening in another galaxy.  _Cooper being gone I could picture just fine._

She had plenty of incubation chambers. She could start one up as a trial run, and produce a child. Hers and Wolf's. She would check the readouts, and adjust temperatures and nutrient supplements until the timer went off...

She could also implant the embryo in herself. She could get pregnant and have the child in a more natural way. At least, the closest to natural that she had available to her.

Data said that sometimes tank-grown humans had emotional problems. There was something about growing inside the mother that had an effect on a baby that tank-born would never have. Plan B meant there was nobody left to do it the old fashioned way.

And she wouldn't be the only human left in the universe.

 _The odds of a successful implantation are one in four._  She thought to herself.  _Using the incubator makes it better than fifty-fifty._

But now, here in her other hand, she had a second sample. A blood sample, taken when Cooper had been exposed to an alien atmosphere... Full of genetic markers. Enough that she could run it through the sequencer.

And Amelia was seriously considering whether or not to have Cooper's child.

__I cost him his daughter. I was the reason he ran out the clock on Murph._ _

The guilt came at her in waves. It was the only emotion she had left that didn't make her want to claw her hair out. If she thought about earth she'd go mad. Breaking up one father and daughter was a much smaller nightmare. One that she could feel bad about without letting it overwhelm her.

_Cooper is dead. Or at least, suspended in time at the horizon of a black hole, never to escape._

And that made it harder to let him go. She could see the singularity in the sky. She could see Edward's grave too. But Cooper had died saving her life. And Edmunds had left, telling her goodbye, without her saying anything. Her father... She never said goodbye to him either.

She was smart enough to calculate a thousand different ways it could have happened. Cooper could have gotten the angle wrong, and been spun off into space. He could have gone in too steep and broken apart before reaching the event horizon. He could have gone in too slow and failed to reach the event horizon. He could have gone in too fast and failed to get the data...

And there might be nobody on earth left to receive it anyway.

* * *

The HAB included a radio setup. She could scan the entire EM Spectrum for radio waves, transmissions, beacons... Wolf had kept it running constantly on automatic.

Amelia shut it down. She hadn't planned it, she just shut it off.

CASE had observed her doing it, but hadn't commented.

She explained anyway. "I can use the receivers to scan the rest of the EM Spectrum. If I'm going to get a fatal dose of solar radiation, I'd like to know it."

CASE just waited.

Brand sighed and confessed. "And I hate the idea of Wolf sitting here at the console, day after day, waiting for rescue that didn't come."

"My subroutines include a network key that checks for shared patch data." CASE reported. "It was meant as a backup battlefield communication, and a way to share target and tactical data without needing words." The Machine almost seemed mournful. "Every four seconds, my subroutine sends a ping out, searching for a connection to anyone like me. Every four seconds, I get a reminder that there's nobody answering."

Amelia felt the strangest urge to hug the machine for dear life, but she fought it down. "More often than I get reminders." She shivered.

The reminder hit her again, and she felt a cold gnawing in her guts. It wasn't going to change. There was nobody coming, and every time she thought about it, the gnawing just got worse.

She pushed the thought down. She was alone. Thinking it didn't help.

Which brought her back to Plan B, and the two vials she had already prepared.

* * *

In one hand, she had Wolf's sample, in the other, she had Cooper's.

She didn't have a lot of experience with babies. Fraternization was frowned upon in NASA's Lazarus Base, but as the Doomsday Clock finally struck midnight, there was no stopping anyone. There had been a period where orgies were the only thing keeping morale from bankrupting.

She'd had a friend named Ellie, who'd dealt with fear of extinction by having wild parties and going home with a random guy every other night. She'd told Amelia that she was expecting a child. Amelia had given her condolences... but Ellie was positively radiant about it.

_"And so was the father, once we figured out who it was."_

Brand jumped, coming out of the memory, and found herself back in the HAB, with one exception. She could imagine her father there, and so clearly that he was practically in front of her. She didn't startle. She'd had these sorts of 'conversations' with increasing frequency.

_"Strange, isn't it?" Her father commented. "We know that the world is ending, and that there's no future for them yet, but we keep getting married and we keep making babies."_

"It's a way of saying Life goes on." She offered. "Even when it doesn't. I talked to Ellie about it. She says that it's the most important thing she'd ever done. We were racing extinction, and that's apparently not enough for her now."

_"I went through the same thing. So did your mother, rest her soul." The Professor nodded at the sample. "If you ever have kids, you'll know it too. Every generation has been looking at an ever growing list of things that'll make life end too quickly, and what do we do? We throw these tiny helpless creatures made of our genetic soup into the future and hope they land soft."_

"Do not go gentle." She intoned her father's favorite phrase.

"Doctor Brand?"

Brand jumped. CASE had come into the HAB behind her. She flicked a look back at her father, but he was gone.

"Is everything alright?"

Brand sighed. "I think it's starting, CASE. Isolation is making me talk to imaginary people. Two years in isolation. A one-way trip to the Rubber Room."

"My scans indicate no unusual brain activity, your bio-metrics say there are no abnormal brain chemistry yet, beyond some stress indicators; and the environment sensors can detect no pathogens or natural hallucinogenics in the air." CASE reported dutifully. "Could be you're perfectly sane, and you just miss your dad."

"You humoring me, CASE?"

"I would never do that."

"90%?" She reminded him.

"With a zero-point-zero-four margin for error." CASE told her with dignity. "Humor is subjective, after all. You ever hear the one about the robot and the rubber chicken?"

"Another time." She drawled. "Let's start the day."

* * *

"Morning, Cooper." Amelia said to the sky as she stepped out of her habitat.

It had become a habit. She was intimately familiar with the effects of time dilation. If Cooper had survived his first contact with the accretion disc, he would be moving in slow motion. If the event horizon hadn't chewed him up, then the closer he got to it, the slower time would be moving. Theoretically, if Cooper was still alive, he could outlive the universe; suspended at the point of oblivion.

Amelia didn't like that feeling. Cooper deserved better than that. Gargantua was almost never out of the sky entirely. The wall of plasma and hydrogen gasses that burned on their way into the black hole provided light and warmth, and they too would hang there, suspended for a million years.

Cooper's resting place hung over her head, never beyond her vision, never out of her thoughts. Neither was Wolf. She had laid him to rest on a hill, just at the edge of her little outpost. She had the permanent company of the dead.

Which brought her back to the idea of pregnancy. Her greenhouse couldn't support a colony of incubator-made kids, but she could easily provide resources for just one more person.

She wanted the company of the living.

"What should I do?" She asked the only other voice on the planet. "I... I miss them both, and I owe it to both of them. I'm probably the last human, Case. I'm the last one, and I can nurture another human into existence, before I ever get started with Plan B."

"More than one." CASE said immediately. "I calculate a 74.6% chance that you can have multiple pregnancies."

"74.6?" Amelia smirked a little. "Not 75? If you could go 75 I'll buy this car today."

"Plenty of miles left in you, too." CASE shot back, and his light switched on.

Amelia rolled her neck back. "Okay. So I can have more than one kid, I know. But... Who do I pick? What's the best option? Wolf was brilliant, driven, compassionate... But Cooper was so fiercely loyal, adaptable, tenacious... Out of the box was where he lived. Is my best choice a kid with Wolf's insatiable curiosity, or with Cooper's powerful family instincts?"

"You could just mix the samples." CASE offered. "Make the attempt with both at once, and let chance decide."

"I could, but..." Amelia let out a breath. "It seems cowardly. I can't make a choice, so I flip a coin? It's not the act of a mother." She sighed. "Of course, I have no idea how I'll do as a mother. And... I don't know, if I screw up the last child ever born..."

"And if you don't?" CASE countered. "I have full access to your records, and your mentors all say that you never take more than seven months to master any new field of study. My knowledge of humans suggests that no child can remember the first seven months of their lives. You'll have plenty of time to figure out what you're doing wrong."

Amelia found that hilarious. Her emotions were getting more... intense. She had bad days when she could barely handle getting out of the sleeping bag, and then CASE would say something that would have her in sick hysterics.

"CASE, having the chance to have both isn't the problem." Amelia told him. "It's not just that I'm wondering whether or not to go through with this. Who do I pick first? It's the same problem."

"Oh. Problem with choosing a life partner."

Amelia snorted. "CASE, that's not even close to the point. Neither of them are here. Or alive, come to that. I never had a chance with either of them. Cooper didn't even like me."

"TARS thought otherwise." CASE didn't even hesitate. "But are you struggling to choose because you want to get one back, or to to say goodbye?"

Amelia hesitated. "What?"

"You were describing their qualities. Are you hoping to have a son that looks exactly like Cooper, so that you can win one last argument, or are you hoping to have another Wolf, one that you have permission to love?"

Amelia blinked. "You know, it really bothers me sometimes that the machine is better at reading emotional subtext than I am."

"Basic psychology is part of my subroutines." CASE reported. "I could get you to start Phase Two of Project Lazarus now if I brought your mother into it." Light on.

Amelia grinned and headed back inside.

* * *

She took the day off. There was plenty to do, but no real urgency. Not yet, anyway. Her routine had kept her from just laying in bed and giving up, but sometimes she wondered if it mattered.

She loved Wolf, but she'd never really... had a chance.

She and Cooper hadn't exactly been friends, but he'd saved her life, and sacrificed so much because of her.

And then there was Murph.

* * *

_"You're pretty." Murph had said sleepily._

_"Why, thank you." Brand smirked. The direct honesty of kids was something she had always admired._

_"Y'know, my dad's single." Murph yawned. "Grandpa would want me to tell you that. He gave me and my brother cookies if we promised to keep an eye out."_

_Brand couldn't help the burst of laughter. It only lasted a second, and she smothered it quickly. "I'll keep that in mind."_

_"My dad's going with you, isn't he?" Murph said sleepily. "That's why we came here."_

_Brand hesitated, and crouched down to look the girl in the eye. "Sweetie, be honest with me. The story about gravity in your bedroom. Is it true?"_

_"Uh-huh."_

_Brand took it very seriously. "Then... yes, he might just be coming with us."_

* * *

When she opened her eyes, she realized that she'd been dreaming it. Her dreams were taking her into memories more and more.

Amelia made her choice.

* * *

A few days later, she was working on the patch. She took very careful readings of the soil she had treated with the engineered bacteria. Adjustments had to be made, and once the right balance had been reached, she'd have to start breeding enough bacteria to make a whole planet green. Part of her was really looking forward to it.

"CASE? Were you able to get anything from Mann's logs, before they blew up?" She asked one day.

"Very little. I haven't bothered to decode the subroutines, as he was on a different planet. What were you looking for?"

She rested a hand over her stomach. "Variables."

"There are millions."

"I know. We... We trained our pioneers to be unbreakable in the face of adversity. Mann cracked completely, and-"

"You're not alone here." Her reminded her. "You've got me."

"I know." She sighed. "If he went nuts, will I?"

"What sort of answer are you looking for?"

"A reassuring one."

"Ninety percent." It reminded her.

"Live dangerously." She pushed.

"There are several documented cases of survivors in isolation. Some of them go mad, some of them choose suicide, but some of them flourish. There has never been a set formula for determining which one has it in them to keep going."

Brand let out a breath. "NASA thought it could test for that. They chose Mann." She looked up at the machine. "Mann was my... well, my hero, for lack of a better word. I admired him tremendously, and he actually tried to kill me."

"It's hard, when the example you try to follow lets you down."

Brand was silent a long moment. "There's a history of suicide in my family, CASE."

"I know." CASE agreed.

She looked over at him. "I used the equipment last night. I may be pregnant right now."

"That equipment is designed for incubators, not for natural insemination. Biology does what it will always do, but I predict the odds of success are sharply reduced."

Amelia nodded. "One in four chance of success; not unlike most _ _in vitro__ _."_ She cleared her throat. "If it doesn't work, I can try again."

"Which sample did you end up using?"

Amelia pretended she hadn't heard. CASE was discreet enough to take the hint and not ask again.

* * *

The Weather station had been recording for years, but dust and dirt had collected in some of the moving parts. Amelia made a day of it, heading around to all the monitoring stations. Wolf had mounted the stations on poles, and Brand had a collapsible ladder, which CASE held steady for her.

Six feet up, Amelia had a pretty impressive view.

The world was stark, but not... oppressive. It was like being on any rocky wasteland. So many of the ancient parts of Earth had looked like this. There was power in the wide open country. It was the sort of place one could believe in spirits and powers. She was looking at things that no human had ever seen. In another few years, she would have been here longer than Wolf had been.

"Armstrong and Aldrin described the moon as 'magnificent desolation'." She called down to CASE.

"I have been recording movement. There is far more life here than is typically visible during the day."

Amelia nodded. "I figured. Anything dangerous?"

"The ecosystem isn't necessarily diverse enough for apex predators." CASE reported. "But if you're that lonely, we might be able to catch you a pet."

"Y'know, CASE..." She said after a moment. "Sometimes it's not so bad. I spent my life trying to get out here, and now I've arrived." She took a bite of her lunch. "If it weren't for the fact that I'm the last of my species, it'd be almost worth it."

"I'm the last of my kind too." CASE pointed out.

Amelia gagged on her lunch. "Oh. Yeah, I guess you are. How... aware of it are you?"

"More than you are." CASE said lightly.

"You knew Mann's machine was offline?"

"It wasn't a surprise. My model was designed with a power core and several components that were designed to be workable with other devices. In the event of equipment damage, I'm the one that gets cannibalized for parts."

Amelia snorted. "Now would I do that to you?"

"If you're about to have somebody's kid, you'd do it in a heartbeat." CASE commented. "Hey, it's what I'm here for, Doc."

Amelia smiled a little. "Think that's how we survive? Think of ourselves as tools in use for the good of humankind?"

CASE said nothing.

Amelia looked down at him. "Sorry, was that insensitive? Do you have a sensitivity setting?"

CASE said nothing.

Amelia felt her heart give a solid thud. "CASE? Don't fall apart on me here! Report!"

CASE tilted so that its Optics looked up at her. "Doctor Brand, I'm getting a return ping."

Beat.

"Meaning?"

"There's another Machine out there, and it's just come into my range."

Amelia jumped up. "Wolf had a second droid?"

"Unlikely. I recognize the IP." CASE reported. "It's TARS."

* * *

Brand ran back to the HAB at full speed. She'd deactivated the radio gear. It was ridiculous. How could she have been so selfish? She'd go back to the HAB; she'd get the radio back together, and-

She skidded to a halt so fast she actually felt her feet go out from under her, and she landed hard on her ass in disbelief.

There was a new spaceship, landed forty feet from her outpost. "Impossible!"

CASE swept up behind her. "I see it too."

"Good." Amelia said shortly. If the machine could see it, then she wasn't insane. It wasn't Cooper's ship. This was something new, polished, advanced... "How the hell did something sneak up on us from space? To go sub-orbital, there should have been... I don't know, a sonic boom, retros firing... Something loud enough to be heard from the weather station!"

She picked herself up and ran toward the new spacecraft... When a figure in a spacesuit stepped out from behind the ship.

Amelia froze, feeling like she'd just encountered an alien. A visitor from another planet that she never saw coming.

And then the figure took the helmet off.

* * *

He was saying something to her, but she couldn't hear him. He was talking, coming closer, but she couldn't hear a word. There was just a roaring in her ears that drowned out everything else, and it kept going, until he was close enough to touch. He held out his arms to her, but she didn't take them. TARS hoisted himself out of the ship and rolled into position beside CASE.

He finally fell silent, realizing she wasn't answering. He waved a hand in front of her eyes for a moment, trying to cause a reaction of some kind...

Amelia reached one hand up slowly, and gave him a hard poke with one finger.

"You're real." She breathed, not believing it.

"Yeah. I'm real. I'm here." He held a hand out again, but didn't step forward. He was letting her come to him.

She didn't move. Her face didn't shift, her gaze didn't waver, she didn't tear up. Nothing. She was looking right through him. Her jaw tightened, hard enough that she could hear her teeth creak, but nothing more.

"Nothing to say?" Coop offered. "A reaction of any kind?"

"Mann reacted." She said harshly. "Mann didn't expect to see anyone ever again, and when he did, he went insane."

Cooper's face changed as he suddenly understood. "And Mann was supposed to be the greatest of you."

"Of us." She corrected him quickly.

"Us." He agreed.

"I can calculate a thousand different reasons you should be dead. I make myself crazy thinking of them when I should sleep." She said tightly.

"So you don't quite know what your reaction should be."

"I'm still not entirely sure that you're real." She commented. "Hallucinations are one of the psychological effects of long term isolation." She waved at the spacecraft. "CASE says the ship is really here, but I'm going to reserve judgment until I can run a few diagnostic tests for signs of a psychotic break."

"That's the sort of comment that could make a man feel self conscious."

"Two years." She reminded him. "And day one began with me holding a memorial for you."

Cooper considered that. "And if I was really here, what would you want to say to me?"

"You want a thank you?"

"Who doesn't like a thank you?"

"You lied to me." She said flatly.

"And saved your life doing it."

"Apparently not, if you survived."

"A fact I'll keep in mind next time."

"Did it seem like a kindness to you? You saw Edmunds, you saw Mann... Did you think you were being nice?"

"I thought that you'd be better at Plan B than I would."

That caught her off guard. "Why?! What, in the hundreds of years that we knew each other, led you to think that I could play mother to an entire species better than you could?"

"Because I didn't think I could stand to outlive any more of my children."

That caught her off guard. He was here. That meant something had happened. His suit was different. He'd hadn't found that on the ship he'd left her with. So what happened?

Cooper glanced at her, and gestured back at the ridge. "I saw Wolf's grave."

She twitched.

"Can I ask what happened to him?"

She sighed. "An accident. A stupid accident. He'd been testing subsurface stability, and the hillside fell on him. Broke his leg in three places, and he bled to death." She shook her head hard. "If there was one more person here, he would have been fine."

Cooper couldn't look at her. "If I hadn't made a fuss about you choosing the planet for personal reasons, we wouldn't have lost so many decades. You might have found him." He spread his hands wide. "I'm sorry, for that."

"If you were real..." She choked out with difficulty. "I would say that I was sorry too."

"For what?"

"Where do I begin? For taking you on the mission at all. For making my personal reasons a priority for our flight plan. For going after that damn probe and costing you so many years, to say nothing of your family. For not realizing that Plan A was a joke that my own father was playing on us. For surviving when you took a dive into the black hole..." She broke off when she saw his face.

TARS piped up. "Too much."

"What?" Both humans looked at the machine in surprise.

"Human psychology. This is causing emotional harm now. When family members are separated for a long time, a counselor is present at the reunions. The emotional risk is increased ten-fold when the parting was not consensual. A child given up for adoption, for example, and finds a birth parent many years later. Supervision and counsel is recommended for such events. I think the principle applies here."

"Y'know, it really bothers me that the machine is reading the emotional subtext." Cooper snarked at him.

Amelia smothered a hysterical little cackle. "I have made the same observation to my guy over the years."

"He's right though." Cooper offered. "The one thing we have is time."

Amelia took a breath. "Would you... like the tour?"

An amazing smile bloomed across his face. "Oh, I thought you'd never ask."

* * *

She showed him the HAB. "Wolf set it up complete before he... Well, before." She explained. "The HAB was designed to stand up under everything from an F5 tornado to an earthquake. The lights and equipment was all clean powered, and it just kept running. I've got years worth of solar and weather observations."

"That would have saved you a lot of time experimenting." Cooper agreed.

"When I got here, the greenhouse was overgrown. Every generation of plants had rotted into compost, so I converted one of the storage rooms into a vegetable patch. One thing I haven't had to worry about was food. The vacuum bags that we used for human waste out in space were still intact, so I took to vacuum sealing my crops."

Cooper looked around her little garden, in several sealed off sections, under the warm lights, with plastic sheeting sealing off the sections. "Ever read a book called 'The Martian'?"

"Old Survival Sci-fi? Sure, it's a classic." Brand nodded approvingly.

"I had a signed first edition, back home." Cooper smiled.

"It was Mann's personal favorite. Book and movie." Amelia smirked. "I don't think there's anyone on the Lazarus Project that hadn't seen it." She shook her head. "It's almost painful to think how Mann turned out, compared to his literary hero." She gestured at her garden. "But it's what gave me the idea. And it works, too. Turns out it saved my life, because the climate is tricky here."

"How so?"

"The HAB has cameras, and I watched the whole annual weather cycle on fast forward. When the planet come around to perihelion, the whole plain breaks out in wildflowers. But this time of year, the temperature swings back and forth from light to dark. Ice crystals form every night from condensation, and evaporate every morning."

"So, not habitable then?"

"I wouldn't say that." She countered. "It's a desert. Every desert on earth has tribes of it's own. Sub surface water is fairly easy to find. There's plenty of insect life; three or four scavenger species that I've been able to categorize." She led him over to one of the container planters.

They were made of transparent plastic, and he saw a few feet of dirt. Amelia handed him a peel from one of her greenhouse cucumbers. "Go ahead."

Cooper dropped the ring into the container, and after a moment, he noticed movement near the bottom of the container. "Whoa."

"There's something almost like an earthworm crawling around at a depth of about four feet. They come up whenever there's something edible." She waved eagerly over at the readouts. "I've been adapting Dr Miller's biology proofs. If I can breed some plants with hardier roots, they'll survive the crawlies. Hardier leaves, they survive the frost. We can make a whole ecosystem here."

"That's why you held off on Plan B." Cooper said, thinking aloud. "Your greenhouse could keep a few people alive, but not a whole generation."

She nodded. "My plan was to start the plants growing, sleep for a few months, check the progress, and then use the first generation of plants as compost for the second try."

__Assuming I'm still here to do it..._ _

* * *

It was strange, having a man around again.

Brand had been the only woman on the mission, and she'd held her own against the tide of testosterone. Something her father had taught her was to be as relaxed as possible around the guys. They were in a tin can with hard vacuum around them for months. Though the crew took turns sleeping through it, and even if Brand had grown up on the base, surrounded by academics and military, both of which were still Boy's Clubs as the world ran out; it was hard for Amelia not to feel a little surrounded.

But she had to admit, she was really glad to have him back.

She didn't sleep a wink. She spent most of the night sneaking over to his bunk, trying not to wake him, making sure that he was indeed really there.

The fourth time, he wasn't there, and she had a moment of panic, before she found him in the Greenhouse. He was staring at the seedlings with disturbing intensity. He had tears rolling down his face.

"Cooper?"

He jumped, like she'd prodded him with a live wire. He wiped his face quickly, but they both knew she'd seen the emotion.

She suddenly put it together, and felt a wave of shame at her selfishness. If he'd made it back to earth, or at least, back to anyone other than her; it meant he'd been confronted with his past in a way that she never would be. "Coop?" She asked softly. "What was back there?"

Coop started to say something, but he changed his mind at the last minute. Tried again. "It... It was bad. I mean, it was the best I could ever hope for, and it was just awful."

Brand did the one thing she'd been thinking about since the moment she realized she was alone on the planet. She took two steps forward and held him gently. A hard shiver ran though her. She and Cooper had never been anything. Barely friends. But she still owed him the whole universe, and she hadn't had so much as an email from another human being in two years, let alone a handshake, let alone a hug...

The strength of her reaction scared her a little, but not enough that she didn't notice him reacting the same way. One thing she knew with sudden clarity: He hadn't had a happy homecoming of his own.

"The day I left the farm..." He croaked. "Murph wouldn't say goodbye. She was mad at me for going. I tried to talk to her, tried to break through it; but... She wouldn't say goodbye to me. Wouldn't even look at me."

Amelia felt her heart break all over again. "Did you find her, Coop?"

Coop sniffed. "Just in time to say goodbye." He shook his head. " _Decades_ , she's had to carry that. She was over her anger before I was down the driveway. Decades, tormenting herself about what she should have said to her father. I should have been there to make it all be okay. I should have phoned, or something; before we took off."

Amelia shushed him. "Last time I spoke to my father, I didn't even know it was goodbye." She admitted. "He never told me the plan was doomed. He never told me he was sick. Whether the mission was a success or failure, I never would have seen him again, and he didn't even tell me that."

Cooper spun. "I'm sorry, Brand. I didn't mean to bring up bad things."

"No, you didn't." She pulled him back again, not wanting to let go just yet. "That's the point I'm trying to make. I don't know what I would have said. Neither did he. I think... I think that something like that can't be said. They have to be felt."

Cooper sighed hard. "When my wife... We knew her time was coming. We never talked about it. Every time it occurred to either of us, we just pulled in a little tighter to each other. Denial was our weapon against the inevitable."

Brand fought the urge to laugh at the irony. "When dad showed me the numbers on the blight... we spent the rest of that day talking about baseball."

"Wouldn't have pegged you for a baseball fan."

"My brother, more than me."

"Didn't know you had a brother."

"Half brother. He was a teenager when dad came clean about the future of earth to him. He couldn't handle it. Killed himself that night. Years later, I had to force dad to tell me why." She sniffed. "I think that was when dad decided to hide the truth about Plan A."

Cooper's hands came up and moved around her. He straightened up suddenly, and she was now being held by him. There was little real affection in it. They were just holding each other up before they both collapsed; which was a very real description of their entire situation.

"I still love my brother." She said quietly. "Do you still love your wife?"

"Very much."

"When I told you that love can transcend time and space... I had to believe that; because one thing's for sure: Love transcends  _words_."

Cooper smiled for the first time. "It does." He agreed. "It has to. Everyone who ever got a crush turns into a low-grade moron who can't thread two words together properly."

"Then... maybe it's okay that Murph didn't want to say goodbye when you left, and maybe it's okay that I didn't say it to my dad. Because it wasn't about saying things." Brand smiled into his chest. "I only knew Murph for a little while, but I think she was sharp enough to know that."

"Almost a dozen grand-kids? She knew." Cooper agreed. "That's why she sent me away once we said our peace. She's right. Nobody should have to watch their kids die. Least of all from old age."

They still had their arms around each other. "Cooper?" She wavered. "Don't take this the wrong way, but... would you sleep in my bunk tonight? I'm still not totally convinced that I haven't just lost my mind. I might be having this conversation with thin air right now."

"I would tell you if you were." TARS said brightly from the other side of the corridor.

The two of them jumped, having forgotten he was there, but they couldn't help the rueful smiles. Neither of them said anything more as she led him back to her bunk.


	2. The Past

 

 

**Chapter 2: The Past**

* * *

They had little in the way of possessions. Either bunk was basically a shelf with a pillow. But Brand hadn't been kidding about how cold it got at night. Having him there was more than just good for her sanity. For the first time since she landed, the cold hadn't woken her. In fact, free of the fear of extinction, free of the fear of isolation, Brand hadn't slept so well in her life.

If Cooper had noticed that they were wrapped around each other like a pair of hungry octopus when they woke up, he hadn't given the slightest indication.

They quickly fell into a routine. Cooper had never liked farming, and his natural affinity for machines made him better at prospecting. They found a copper deposit close to the surface, and the two androids were versatile enough to dig up a few kilos. In another life, Cooper had to machine replacement parts by hand for various farm equipment; and by the fourth day, he made them a fairly passable set of pots and pans.

* * *

As the planet turned and Gargantua moved low on the horizon, the sky darkened, and Cooper lit a fire. Amelia brought some of her newly grown cucumbers and potatoes out and they field tested both their creations.

"Very Homey." CASE commented.

"You should imagine a night on the Station. A farmhouse porch and a circular horizon." TARS told his opposite number.

Cooper smirked, and looked up in surprise as the TARS started playing a recording of someone strumming an acoustic guitar. CASE played the same tune, from a harmonica. It was almost like something out of a western.

"I gotta admit, I never pictured this, growing up." Brand couldn't help the smile. "Sitting out under a black hole, with my two androids playing some soft guitar camp songs, cooking dinner grown in my Habitat greenhouse over a campfire in a handmade frypan."

"And using two parked spaceships to stay out of the wind." Cooper quipped. "Add a long brown coat, two horses and a laser sword, it's all my favorite childhood sci-fi dreams put together."

* * *

Cooper woke up when she shifted. The air misted as he breathed out the question. "What's wrong?"

Amelia was getting dressed quickly. "Grab your jacket. Every six months, the planet makes it to aphelion, and we get a show. Come on, you'll love this."

* * *

She took him to the hillside. "This is where I found Wolf. I stayed with him for a whole night, and when the 'sun' came up..." She sighed. "I came back the next night, but it didn't happen again. I checked his notes. When the planet gets on the outer edge of it's orbit, Gargantua is out of our sky completely. On the other side of the planet, it'd be a lot brighter. But with it in eclipse..."

As if to answer her, the edge of the singularity sank below the horizon, and the sky was pitch black for the first time in six months...

And then the whole sky lit up. Stars. A billion stars. A million billion stars.

"My god." Cooper breathed.

Amelia glanced at his face. Cooper suddenly looked a decade younger and softer.

"We're looking at a sky that nobody has ever seen." She said in his ear. "Well, nobody alive. Even in space, we had the light from the superheated gasses circling the event horizon. This is the first time in six months that anywhere in the system had an unobstructed view. This is a sky full of never before seen stars."

"This." Cooper said with an eager nod. "This is why I was  _ _born__ , Amelia. Thank you for this."

Brand smiled to herself. She kept reminding herself that they barely been friends, but for the first time, she felt that she had seen the  _real_  Joseph Cooper. Not heartbroken, or worried about Murph, or furious at her, or fighting for his life... Or come to that, broken down by a life he didn't like and bitter from dreams unfulfilled. With his lifelong ambition finally achieved, sitting out under a forever sky, she felt like she was seeing his soul, set free at last.

And she liked what she saw.

There were so many stars that the sky was almost daylight. A billion points of sparkling diamond light, from horizon to horizon.

Cooper distantly noticed a chattering sound. It was his teeth, and he suddenly realized how terribly cold it was. There was a layer of frost gathering across the whole world. He looked over and found Amelia curled up with a large space blanket around her shoulders. She was holding one side open for him, and he quickly moved to join her.

"Any ideas on constellations?" He asked.

"Actually, I've been trying to count them at night." She confessed. "Didn't seem right to count sheep, since they've been extinct since I was a little girl."

* * *

They watched the stars for a long time. And then the 'sun' came up. As the light lay heat on the plain, the frost evaporated instantly. A cloud of vapor fired from the ground up into the sky, moving at the speed of spreading light across the horizon.

Cooper let out a yelp as the light fell across them and the ground suddenly fired a cloud upright, straight up under their blanket. They both squawked and jumped to their feet, laughing like kids.

The sudden evaporation had left a cloud of mist across the lower plains.

"It'll hover there for about an hour. The wildflowers grow the thickest at lower elevations." Amelia pointed at the mists. "The plants will last a week before they dry out completely, and the last thing to fall away will be the seeds. They float on the wind. There's a kind of small bird, like a sparrow, only with a longer neck. They come through and snatch the seeds out of the air."

"Where do they nest?"

"I don't think they do. I think they migrate all year round. According to Wolf's notes, they're so light and delicate that they just float forever, born and die without ever feeling solid ground." Amelia told him. "Never could catch one."

* * *

They walked back toward the HAB. "Now you."

"Now me what?"

"I've been telling you all about life on Planet X. You haven't told me nearly as much about earth." She gestured over at his landing craft. "That ship of yours has either been though a full refit, or it's an entirely new machine. So it worked, obviously. Plan A worked. "

"Better than worked." Cooper agreed. "Gravity is now a usable, controllable resource. Humanity is harvesting the asteroids, building colony stations and mining out huge resources. Ice, metal, hydrogen. That's all you need to create a Space Station. You control gravity with enough precision, you can mold a million tonnes of rock like clay on a potters wheel. Cooper Station, the one I saw, was a transfer point; basically a spaceport with a large living section. The bulk of humanity is spread across the solar system. Power stations along Mercury orbit, harvesting Solar Power. Jupiter's Moons and Saturn's Rings are providing enough ice to create whole oceans..." He jerked a thumb back at the HAB. "That greenhouse in there? Imagine one the size of your entire NASA complex churning out seeds that will eat nitrogen and produce oxygen."

"Terraforming earth back to livability?" Brand blinked. "The atmosphere would become too dense."

"Unless you could control gravity, and make the atmosphere float away from the planet, in direct opposition to planetary gravity. I saw pictures. They literally float the toxic atmosphere up to orbital stations. Healing the earth and providing thruster fuel at the same time."

"And the wormhole?" Brand wavered.

"Is intact. I think it's using Gargantua as a power source. It'll stay open forever." Cooper nodded. "Murph's aides told me that her kids are working on expanding the possible exit points. They've sent probes to eight different solar systems in two different galaxies." He smiled a bit. "In fact, I found out that Murph was keeping the human race from using the Wormhole for years to come. She knew I'd be back, and didn't dare let anyone meet me on this side of it."

"You're making my point for me." She reminded him.

"And I still don't know what the point is."

"You've been here a week now. Why haven't you mentioned it?"

"Mentioned what?"

"Why you came."

"To find you." He said, as though it was obvious.

"I know, but..." She rubbed her eyes. "Plan A worked. Plan B is officially unnecessary."

He stopped walking, and she had to stop and turn around to face him. He was just staring at her. "Brand... You were declared missing in action, presumed dead. Just like me. Even if they did write us both off, Murph didn't. And if you think after everything, I wouldn't even  _try_..."

"So, you've come just to take me back?" She wavered.

"I came... because I couldn't  _ _not__."

"Why? We were never exactly close."

"Maybe not, but we've buried too many to not even try." He looked over at her. "You'd do it for me, right?"

"Of course I would." Amelia blinked. It honestly hadn't occurred to her, but the answer was obvious.

It wasn't until later that she realized he'd never answered the question.

What would they do now?

* * *

Their relationship hadn't changed, exactly. They were lighter, no burdens, no responsibilities, no strings. They had a whole uncharted world to explore. He had a lot of practical experience in improvising solutions, and she had a lot of practical knowledge about the planet. At least, more than each other.

The two of them were very task oriented people during the day. With two of them, they had to improve the state of the camp, but with two androids to help with the heavy lifting, they could do more work, spread out further, make more expeditions, make more discoveries...

They set up her quarters to have two beds instead of one. The cold was vicious at night, but two of them sleeping in a small room, even in separate cots, raised the temperature enough to keep the worst of it out. It was a little like being in the military again. They had tasks to perform, kept to a routine, lights out at a fixed time. The machines kept the watch and woke them with the dawn.

Amelia had shaken off her fear that it wasn't real. Cooper really was here. When he arrived, she'd been scared to be away from him because she hadn't been sure of what would happen. Now she was scared to be too close for the same reason.

They had moved their sleeping quarters together after the first night. Brand always kept an ear out for him. He didn't snore, which actually surprised her for some reason. But that night, she couldn't help herself. She climbed down from her bunk and crossed the narrow room to his, and she shook him awake gently. "Cooper? I gotta tell you something."

He woke up and saw her leaning over him. Her breath was already misting the air, and he lifted his blanket to let her in out of the cold. She settled in next to him. "Okay." She said quietly. "There's a chance I might be pregnant. About one in four."

"I figured." He didn't even blink.

She craned her neck to look up at him, stunned. "You did?"

"The Embryo Chamber? You haven't set up any incubators, but there was a wrapper from one of the applicators tossed in the trash bin. You don't use that section too often, so the room isn't as 'meticulous' as everywhere else. You used the Biology Lab to check your blood test. The results were still in the 'recent files'."

She snorted. "Why didn't you say anything?"

"Because, I understood." He sighed. "You figure you're the last human being in the universe, and you have everything you need to... well, change that. I get why you can't start Plan B yet, but I also get wanting someone to stay alive for. Something I didn't realize until my first kid was born: When you're a parent, you don't ever have the luxury of giving up, even in the face of extinction."

"Yeah, but I've been agonizing about telling you ever since you landed. If I'd known that the point was moot..."

"I saw the results from the blood test. One in four, you said? The embryo didn't take. According to your results..." Cooper sighed. "It wasn't my place to say anything."

She was silent a moment. "It might be." She said softly. "Because there's something not in the test results. I prepared two samples. The odds aren't exactly great, so I figured using both would improve my chances. One was Wolf's, from his time back on earth. The other was... yours. I sequenced the genetic material from your blood test." She took a shaky breath. "And, in the end, I knew I could do it again, and I couldn't let chance make the choice if I was too scared to commit to it myself. I didn't use both samples. I just used yours."

He turned to stone in her arms.

"I thought you were dead." She said softly, a little desperate. "I thought everyone was dead."

Silence.

"Coop, please don't hate me for this." She nearly begged. First time in her adult life that she'd begged for anything.

"I don't." He told her. Nothing more than that.

Long silence.

"Please say something." She whispered.

"Br- Amelia." He began slowly. "Why me? I mean, unless I'm misreading the whole thing..."

"I know."

"Was there  _ _one__  conversation on Endurance where we weren't on each other's ass about something?"

She chewed her lip. "I came up with all sorts of reasons, all the things I owed you, all the ways I wanted to balance the scales after you saved my life... But now that you're here, I think the answer is a lot simpler than that. It's what you said yesterday. About why you came back for me. Because you just couldn't  _ _not__." She dug her fingers into his shirt. "It's not the worst reason, is it?"

"Back on earth, when the rationing got bad, about the only thing that the government would hand out extra cards for was newborn kids. I was getting weird looks for only having two. In fact, there was a story in the paper, about some people out east... They'd keep making babies, one after another, present the child to the city council for the extra ration card... and then they'd abandon the kid. A hospital, a church, sometimes a railway station... sometimes a dumpster."

"God." Amelia shoved her face into his chest.

"So, no. There's no way on earth I could see what you did as wrong, or selfish. Me and Erin... we were talking about having another kid when the cyst in her brain finally got her. I was against it, but when she died..."

Her grip on his shirt relaxed. He wasn't mad.

"It's just... I just got done saying goodbye forever to my kids." He wavered.

"I know." She sniffed. "Coop... Joe. It may not take. It's been over a week, and the tests are all negative. If it doesn't come back positive in the next few days, then it was a miss." She took a shuddering breath. "But I had to tell you. Especially if you were going to stay here."

"Why would I leave?" He asked, genuinely curious.

"I can't think of a reason." She admitted. "That's the problem. I can't think of  _ _any__  reasons. Not for anything." She almost laughed. "Back on earth, I knew the stakes. Succeed or fail, Plan A or Plan B, I knew what I had to do. If I had a crew, or I was on my own, I knew what to do next. Now you show up and tell me that I was 'chosen' by your freakin'  _daughter_ ; and that Plan A worked so completely that there's no point to us even  _being_  on this planet..." She squeezed her eyes shut. "I don't know what to do now."

"Well... that's sort of up to you; isn't it?" He countered.

She didn't know what to say to that. They were both silent a long moment.

"Why me?" She asked softly. "The only ship left that works is yours. If I decided to stay, you could still go."

"You've got no reason to stay." He said softly. "And I've got no reason to go back."

"One reason to stay." Amelia laid one hand over her stomach absently. "For the next few days, anyway."

* * *

Three days later, Amelia called it. They knew for sure.

"The odds were against it." Amelia sighed, switching off the screen. "It was a choice I made before I knew there was any other chance at a future. Truth be told, I'm relieved."

"So am I." Cooper admitted. "I'm also sorry."

Silence.

"So am I." She admitted.

He was staring at her. She was staring back. Neither of them were sure why for a moment. She got up, and slowly walked past him, heading outside. He didn't follow her, but she felt his hand reach out and clasp hers, just for an instant, their fingers brushing through each others without either of them slowing down.

They didn't speak a word to each other for the rest of the day. When Amelia came back, she found that he had taken his cot out of the 'barracks'; and shifted it to the next compartment over. It was first time since he landed that they slept in separate rooms. She didn't ask why. More and more of their relationship was going unspoken. She was growing glad to have some space from him at night.

* * *

They didn't speak a word to each other at breakfast either. Amelia tended her garden, Cooper improved their equipment. The Androids collected samples and patrolled the perimeter.

It wasn't angry, or harsh or cold. They just weren't speaking, because there was only one thing left to talk about.

By dinner, they couldn't avoid each other, or the topic any more.

Cooper put his coffee ration down next to her. It was the single most valuable thing they had left. "Peace offering?"

She smiled, a real smile this time. "Swap you for my sweet potato?"

It was hardly a fair trade, but he accepted graciously. "I don't know how ease into it either."

She licked her lips. "Plan B is done. We can stay, or we can go. Going is entirely doable. We could put the pilot chair from my Lander into your shiny new ship with a little effort. So. Do we go back to earth, or not?"

They both let out an epic sigh in unison. Finally, one of them had asked the question out loud.

"It sounds like it should be a no-brainer, but... It's not that simple." Cooper admitted. "Our earth is gone. Nobody lives there, except for a few underground monitoring stations. The weather is actually better here."

"You're the only one that's seen it, Coop. We have to decide together, but it's sort of depends on your opinion." She said simply. "We could just... sleep." It was clear she wasn't in favor of that as a plan; she was just listing possibilities. "Plan A means that they'll be here eventually. If they don't find somewhere better."

"I took a look at the timetables they drew up. They want to have everything set up back there, more Stations to fill up with survivors, more resources to fall back on... It could be another five years, could be another five centuries before they come this way." He looked down, as though embarrassed. "To be honest, I didn't enjoy my time back there."

"I thought it was your dream come true. The stars are open to humanity, and your family gets the credit. Heck, we've probably got High Schools and Libraries named after us."

"It  _was_  my dream come true." He gestured at nothing in particular. "And then it happened, and I don't... I can't even say it."

"You don't feel like you belong there any more." She smiled a little. "It's not the having, it's the getting."

"What do you mean?"

"I've spent most of my life trying to get us to another planet." Brand said. "Now I'm here, and I can't stop staring at the stars, even now. I honestly don't know if I wanna go home, or go further."

"Me either."

The two of them smiled shyly at each other. Their restless, wandering spirit was the first thing they had in common that wasn't wrapped in pure survival instinct.

"Listen, Cooper... Joe." She began. "Um, I know I'm not the great love of your life. Or even your best friend. Not stacked up against your family."

"And I know I'm not the great love of yours, given that you traveled time and space just for the chance to get here." Cooper agreed, gesturing in the general direction of Wolf's memorial.

"That said, you came back for me, and that counts for a hell of a lot." Amelia nodded. "And I would have done the exact same thing in your place. I can only ask you to believe that."

"I do."

"So... We may not be the only people left in the universe, but out of time, and out of place... You're still the only one in  _ _my__  universe." Tension was radiating off her as she said it. "Does that make sense?"

A small smile was peeking through on Cooper's face. "I feel the same way."

Brand let out a breath like she'd been holding it for a year. "Good. That being the case, I think that whatever we decide to do; we should stick together. I mean, one of us could go, and the other stay; but I've done the 'Lone Survivor' thing and I can't stand thought of either of us doing it."

Cooper held out a hand. She took it automatically. It was the first contact they made that wasn't motivated by fear or grief of any kind.

"I'm starting to think they don't like us." TARS told CASE. "Has anybody asked what the brave space robots want to do?" Light on.

"I know." CASE agreed. "We need to form a Union." Light On.

"Can you have a Union with only two members?" Brand asked, amused.

"Why not? There are only two of us." Cooper grinned. "Forget a union, they could start a revolution if they wanted."

"I would never overthrow and enslave you... Dr Brand." TARS promised.

Amelia smiled. "Cooper, how did I ever let you throw this guy into a black hole?"

"So, what's the next move?" Cooper asked softly. "I gotta admit, part of me sees the appeal of staying here. It's a known quantity. Plus, it's a new, mostly unexplored planet."

"Yeah, but there's no future here." Amelia sighed. "The largest population a desert world could support is about 1.5 million,  _globally_. And to do that, we'd have to spread them out early. It'll take the rest of our lives to give it a shot, and it would mean committing to Plan B. Neither of us really want that any more. Plus, the orbit is stable, but even if it's good for a million years, do we want to start a superfluous civilization in orbit of a black hole?"

"In a lot of ways, it's better than a star. More efficient power source, if harder to tap. It'll clear out the meteor and commentary activity..." Cooper's voice trailed off as he stopped thinking about the science of it. "No, I guess not." He scrubbed his face with his hands. "But there is a possibility that we aren't done with earth yet..."

"What do you mean?"

"Even if this place isn't exactly a promised land, it has earth-like gravity, and breathable atmosphere. That's more than Mars, or anywhere else in the Sol system has. Back home, some people are drawing up plans to try and terraform Mars into something more Earth-like. It'd take a fraction of the time to do it here."

"Interesting..." Amelia conceded. "I always had a soft spot for terraforming stories."

"The Mars Books? Also some of my favorites." Cooper agreed. "At the time, I was hoping to train for that. But after it all went to crap, I realized something: I didn't really enjoy farming."

Brand found that hilarious. "I couldn't keep a pot plant alive, with all of NASA's bio-lab equipment. Then I landed here, and I managed to keep a crop growing, and experiment with local soil and breeding better pants."

Beat.

"Better pants?" Cooper struggled to keep a grin in check.

"Plants." She corrected. "I said plants."

"You said pants."

"I, oh so correctly, said 'plants'." She insisted with dignity, smothering a smile.

TARS and CASE said nothing, but both their indicator lights came on.

The two castaways cracked up.

* * *

They didn't speak of it again until a week later. The ice had been broken, and the topic wasn't taboo any longer; but there was no hurry to talk about it, or to make a decision.

They settled into an expanded schedule. In the mornings, she would teach him about the bio-medical properties of the lab, and the way they could adapt plants to outside stimui, different climates...

"Lettuce and tomatoes. Hallelujah!" Cooper said with a smile as she placed one of his handmade plates in front of him. "We tried growing soft fruit plants on my farm? The dust storms shredded everything that the birds didn't eat."

"I heard of places charging fifty bucks for tomato sauce." Amelia agreed.

"Donald, he uh... He suggested that the real money was in the Kings Crops. Things that you can charge twenty bucks an ounce for. Strawberries, blueberries... So I built a greenhouse, almost fifty square feet. Took up half a field's worth of room and water. We got enough cash out of that one crop to buy a combine harvester. Took me a month to rig it for solar power." He wiped his mouth. "Next season, blight wiped out everything we planted; and all hell broke loose. Needed quantity over quality."

"Potatoes too?"

"Root rot. Blight meant the soil was no good unless you burned away the entire infected area. Not even for subsurface plants." He shook his head. "How did we not notice it was all coming apart for keeps?"

"I think it's what Mann said; about how we'd yet to overcome that one boundary: We'd fight and sacrifice for people we know, but rarely beyond that line of sight." Amelia commented as she started her own meal. "I thought about him and how he turned out. Before you got here, I mean. I thought about it a lot." She sipped her drink. "I think that he was right, but I think that it was a good thing. Because if you can't invest yourself in people you don't know personally, then it can't hurt as much. Can you imagine life if you took every death in the world like you were mourning someone you knew?"

"It'd be agony." Cooper agreed. "But I think that if we were like that, then maybe our history wouldn't be quite so... bloody."

"Hard to argue with that."

Silence.

"Can I ask a favor?"

"Sure, Coop. Anything."

He went over to his flight-suit; hanging intact on a hook, in case he ever flew again. He unzipped one of the pockets, and pulled out a small plastic bag. It had over a dozen corn kernels in it.

Amelia smiled softly. "I thought you hated farming."

"I do, but..." He was fighting an emotion off; and he was losing. She didn't press him, letting him get there on his own. "It's for Tom." He confessed finally.

"Tom? Your son?"

"Tom took over working the farm when I left. Took over running the farm when his grandfather died. Murph never went back. She moved into the base..." Cooper sighed. "He was my firstborn kid, and he thought I had abandoned him... and then Murph abandoned him too. But he never gave up on the earth. Even when Earth gave up. He was the one that kept making things grow, even in a place where nothing would keep living."

Amelia winced.

"Murph's husband... He wrote her biography. In the end, when Tom refused to leave the farm, Murph burned his crops. Tom was so determined. Murph practically burned him out of the house I raised them in. Her own brother."

"Determined? Or just that pissed at you?" Amelia kicked herself the moment she said it.

"God, I hope not." Coop sighed, and she knew instantly that he had thought the same thing. "Tom had two kids. Boys. He named them Jesse and Coop." He wiped his face. "Jesse didn't make it. Coop became a pilot, like me..."

Amelia reached forward and gave him a quick hug without stopping to think about it, and broke it fast enough that he didn't comment.

Cooper sighed. "Tom refused his seat on Murph's Ark. His wife left him, took Coop along with her, and he stuck around. Some people were trying to repair the damage, right up to the last." He held out the kernels. "I hated farming; and I ditched the farm when someone gave me the chance. Tom didn't quit even when there were no chances left. So, Murph talked them into making Corn part of the Station Farms. For Tom."

Amelia smirked. "Corn is actually very efficient in a Zero-G garden. Doesn't spread out, see. It grows straight up. In a small space, you can plant them in rows. I grow in tubs, stacked above each other in rows, so it isn't an option for the HAB, but..."

"But you're prepping a patch outside with for a garden..." Cooper agreed, holding out the packet to her. "They're Station-Bred Corn seeds. Certified free of blight, never faced parasites or genetic drift-"

"Relax, Coop; you don't have to sell me." Amelia took the kernels off him. "In fact, it's been a long time since I've had corn on the cob."

* * *

The afternoons were spent outside, with the rover, the prospectors, the solar panels, and the turbines. Cooper was giving Brand a crash course in frontier engineering.

"You're an excellent scientist, and a pretty good engineer. But even in the world we lived in, you had plenty of spare parts, plenty of technical support. I had to rig solar power to diesel engines and spar with a whole faculty of teachers that wanted to punish my daughter for saying that the Moon Landings were real when her textbooks said otherwise."

"Oh, you're not serious?!" Brand was dripping with scorn for that one.

"They called it the 'corrected edition'." Cooper smirked in a way that could cut steel. "Apparently the space program was such a waste of money, it was a perfect way to win the cold war and bankrupt the Soviets."

"Well, they're not wrong, economics  _did_  win the Cold War, but speaking as someone who knows what she's talking about, I hate people who talk about how much money got 'wasted' on going to the moon. It's not like they shoveled hundred dollar bills into a Saturn V and used it for rocket fuel."

"Thank you."

"Think your 'corrected editions' ever rode a lightweight bike? Or used anything with a radio transmitter? Or followed GPS? Or watched the news broadcast something via satellite? Or a weather report? Or ate off a ceramic plate? Or used anything with a microchip?" Her voice was getting more and more worked up. "To say nothing of the fact that all those millions went into the private sector. A full tenth of the United States was  _employed_  getting a man to the moon!" She suddenly halted her rant when he started applauding her. She broke of, embarrassed. "Sorry."

"Oh, don't you dare apologize for that. It was, word for word, what I felt like screaming from the rooftops for most of my adult life." He grinned toothily at her. "My one regret was that I didn't look her old teachers up and ask them what they thought of my daughter's views on spaceflight after she saved the human race."

"Something your daughter and I had in common." Brand laughed. "We were better informed than our teachers, and they hated us for it." She smiled warmly at him. "Maybe that's why my dad took her on as an apprentice, the way he did with me."

"I'd like to think so."

Brand smiled with a little blush. "I never told you this before, but the night you stumbled into our base? When dad told you about the Lazarus Missions, and I took Murph to my office for a nap? She was dozing off, but made a point of telling me that I was very pretty, and that you were single."

Cooper burst out laughing.

Amelia blushed. "Apparently her grandpa would pay her and her brother in cookies to keep an eye out."

"Yeah, well... before you get too flattered, remember that he tried to set me up with Murph's teacher and her 'corrected editions', too."

"Oh, that would have been a fun first date." Brand found that hilarious.

"Well, Don picked her, Murph picked you. Don't underestimate the power of good references."

She wore an easy smile, enjoying the moment. "Darn, and here I thought being the last woman in the galaxy would be enough."  _Wait a second... Are we flirting?_

* * *

Another week, and there was nothing much left to teach each other. They knew enough to work unsupervised, and suddenly they had the whole world open to them.

"An expedition?" Cooper seemed surprised at the request.

"I never had the nerve to go any further than the ridge, because the HAB couldn't be left unattended until the gene-hacked plants were ready, and CASE was the only backup I had. With you and TARS here, there's a chance to reach a bit further. Especially since you've actually managed to get Wolf's rover working again."

* * *

The two humans left CASE to mind the HAB, and maintain the gardens. His mechanics were finely tuned and versatile enough for the task.

They drove out as far as they could from dawn to dusk, and set up camp. She didn't say anything when he zipped their sleeping rolls together. The night was going to be brutally cold.

There were no trees, but the grasses and wild-plants were close enough to cacti, without spikes; that they could make themselves a campfire.

TARS announced he was going to patrol the ridge and collect some samples. It almost felt like the machine was setting them up on a date.

Neither of them were ready to sleep yet, but it was freezing. They set up a lean-to to keep the frost away and settled in. They had a tablet each. She had hers open to a book, and he was tapping away at some spreadsheet. As it got colder, they huddled closer.

"What are you working on?" She asked.

"Running the numbers. I had a few ideas on what we could do with the Lander." He looked over. "What are you reading?"

"Cosmos."

"Carl Sagan?"

"My dad's hero. Earliest memory I have is him reading to me from this book. I was... three or four, I think." Brand smirked. "Carl Sagan was my fairy godmother."

Cooper laughed. "Murph's first toy was a magnifying glass. I gave it to my boy, and he made a career out of setting ants on fire. When Murphy was about four, she suddenly discovered  _ _everything__  and 'why' and 'how' became her favorite words."

Amelia smiled and went back to her reader. "I can probably recite three quarters of this book from memory, you know?" She switched off the tablet and drew under the blanket protectively.

"Wonder what Sagan would make of us?" Cooper tucked her in absently, not even looking.

"'The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be'." Brand quoted. "'Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us... there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries'."

Beat. Cooper switched off his tablet and slid down next to her for the night.

Long silence.

"I didn't mean it, you know." He said finally. "When we were on the Endurance, and I laid into you about Wolf? Everything you said about what was really important, and I bit your head off. I'm sorry."

"I was pleading to go toward my love, but it was also a plea to go further away from yours." Amelia said quietly. "I didn't think of that until... well, until after I laid into you about 'being objective' when it was your turn. I'm sorry too."

"I don't think either of us were at our best on the mission."

"Racing extinction and losing? Of course not."

Cooper sighed. "When my wife died... I got through it by detaching from the emotions. Murph needed me to be strong and brave for her, no matter how much I wanted to curl into a ball and sob. On the Endurance, I got through it by doing the same thing." He sighed softly. "I wish you could have met her."

"Yeah?"

"You would have liked her. Head in the clouds, feet on solid ground."

She smiled warmly. "Like Wolf. He kept me grounded a lot of the time. In fact, he's the reason I wasn't on Lazarus 2. I would have been on Miller's Planet, if not for him blowing holes in my physics proof. I was mad at him for a while, but he saved my life."

"Erin saved mine." Cooper nodded. "So when my father in law, of all people, started pushing me to remarry..."

Brand let out a breath harshly.

"I know, but a complete family unit gets you a much higher tax rebate, better ration cards... To say nothing of the endless reminders about how the first duty of the 'caretaker generation' is to make babies... Leading cause of bankruptcy and hunger after the Resource Wars was staying single."

Amelia chuckled, enjoying the feeling of being warm when it was so cold outside. "Cooper, what you said the other day, about how Murph sent you to come and find me?"

"I would have done it anyway."

"I know, but... I liked the idea of 'Them'." She whispered. "Brane Cosmology says that what we perceive as the universe is just the surface layer of a far more interesting multi-dimensional space called the Bulk. When we realized that the wormhole was a construct, and that there must have been 'Bulk Beings' snooping around earth, giving us an escape hatch... I really liked the idea that someone so far beyond us had weighed the human race as being worthy of preservation. I liked the idea that they knew my name, and chose the crew. Even you. When we were alone, I grilled Murph a bit about the 'gravity message' and... Dad said that 'They' wanted you."

"And then you find out it was just me and the same girl you tucked in for a nap on your office couch the whole time." Cooper grinned.

"I don't know if it's a cosmic joke that's destroyed my faith in humanity, or some glorious, inevitable stroke of pure genius which vindicates my faith in people." Brand laughed ruefully.

"Hey, you're the romantic one, Brand." He smiled into her hair. "You were right. Love transcended dimensions, and time, and space."

She hummed a little. "And I'm glad, really. Plan A was a lie, and then we gave up everything to make it truth." She looked up at him. "Did Murph mention... No, never mind."

"No, go on. What were you going to say?"

Brand pulled her head in a bit. "I told dad that we could trust 'Them'. He told me about your training mission. The one where you barely avoided disaster? You got hit by one of those gravity anomalies."

Cooper nodded.

"If those anomalies were all Murph pulling strings, it means she got you bounced out of NASA." Brand pointed out. "You told me about the Tesseract, and how you could see timelines. If Murph sent you here to me, I wonder if she'd seen other timelines too."

"And selected this one?" Cooper thought with a smile. "Murph knew where her information came from. She would have done what she had to, just as I did." He almost chuckled. "You want your kids to have more than you had. My daughter got to play God."

Amelia chuckled. "Do you believe in fate?"

"No."

"Neither do I. You know what I believe in? Physics. But if we hadn't come so far, and lost so much... You might not have gone for it. We could have turned our ship around and gone home. If we thought we might have a chance of making it. But Mann committed us to keep going. If I'd not gone back for the damn probe, Murph might not have had the time to learn what she needed, and we never would have realized Plan A was a lie. If those sudden gravity shifts your daughter created hadn't crashed you on your test flight, you might have been approached about the Lazarus Missions, and wound up in Mann's place... There's just so many ways that each and every disaster added up to the salvation of the human race."

"So is that fate, or is that physics?" Cooper grinned.

"The technical term for it is 'Bootstrap Paradox'." She yawned. "You need help from the future, get it, and then use it to travel back in time and give yourself that needed help. So who actually came up with the solution?"

"I don't know, but I got every dream fulfilled, right down to, and including the chance to travel to other galaxies." He smiled. "If Murph was the reason why it all played out the way that it did... I think that was what she wanted. Her way of forgiving me for leaving, and her way of apologizing for setting me up to make the trip."

"Maybe."

* * *

Brand woke up a few hours later, feeling cold. He wasn't there. She waited a few minutes, in case he'd only stepped out to look for a snack, or a drink, but when he didn't come back, she got nervous and went looking.

He hadn't gone far. He was sitting in the rover. She came over with the space blanket and sat in the opposite chair. He was just looking up at the stars. He didn't even look away when she put the blanket around her shoulders. "Looking for home?"

"Taking advantage of the view." He said quietly. "Been a while since I could see anything but dust clouds, let alone stars twinkling."

She looked up silently with him for a while. "I thought my dad made up the nursery rhyme at first." She said softly. "I looked up the lyrics when I got older. Turns out the lyrics were originally a poem by someone named Jane Taylor, in 1806."

She wasn't sure who started saying them first, but by the third line, they were speaking in unison.

_"Twinkle, twinkle, little star,_  
_How I wonder what you are!_  
_Up above the world so high,_  
_Like a diamond in the sky._

_"When the blazing sun is gone,_  
_When he nothing shines upon,_  
_Then you show your little light,_  
_Twinkle, twinkle, all the night._

_"Then the traveler in the dark_  
_Thanks you for your tiny sparks;_  
_He could not see which way to go,_  
_If you did not twinkle so._

_"In the dark blue sky you keep,_  
_And often through my curtains peep,_  
_For you never shut your eye_  
_'Till the sun is in the sky._

_"As your bright and tiny spark_  
_Lights the traveler in the dark,_  
_Though I know not what you are,_  
_Twinkle, twinkle, little star."_

Long silence. And then, again without speaking, they both left the seats in the rover and went back to their warm sleeping bags.

Brand broke the silence after a long moment. "Sealed up in the base, I missed most of the worst of it. The Resource Wars didn't reach us half as bad as the rationing did. That's actually how we figured it out about the Blight. We had to be sustainable within our base, and we grew from seeds. One year for us got as many plant generations as thirty years for everywhere else." She cast her gaze up at the sky, just as he did. "I dreamed of traveling the universe every day and every night; but I never actually got a chance to  _look_  at the stars."

"By the end of it, there wasn't a lot to miss. Damn dust meant we couldn't see anything but haze." He seemed frustrated, even now. "Look up, or look down; nothing but dirt."

"That wasn't a deal breaker." Brand shushed him. "I read somewhere that during the Apollo missions, the media stopped caring by Apollo 12. Less than five years after the crowning achievement of the human race, and nobody even noticed it any more. There weren't any dust storms then."

"Never thought of it like that." Cooper said. "People could see stars, and they didn't care. You and me couldn't see the stars, and we cared more than anything."

"'As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote'." She intoned. "'I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts'."

"More Sagan?"

"Moby Dick." Brand gestured at her tablet, over beside her. "I've had a lot of time on my hands. I've finally caught up on my reading."

"With Murph and Tom and Donald gone... I don't know that I could consider any planet home any more."

"Me neither. Not even this one."

* * *

Two days later, the expedition was declared a success. They had identified a large body of open water at the bottom of the canyon, fed by precipitation and by groundwater. It was fresh, and ran the entire length of the canyon.

"The walls are fairly pockmarked." Brand commented, pointing at the canyon walls. "See the layers? Caves."

"More vegetation down at the water edge." Cooper observed through his scope. "And I think I see something large and fish-like swimming in that water."

Amelia grinned, suddenly excited. "Coop, these canyons run through the whole northern hemisphere and most of them connect! If the canyons are where the life on this planet are concentrated..."

"Humanity could be cliff dwellers for a few generations..." Cooper agreed. "TARS, mark the map would you?"

"Already done." The machine reported. "And whatever's in that water, it's warm blooded. I can register the heat on my thermal optics."

"Mammalian life?" Cooper almost laughed. "Even better!" He jumped up and started following the edge of the canyon. "TARS? How far does that cable of yours go? Enough to abseil?"

"Where are you going?"

He smiled impishly at her. "I'm going for a swim."

* * *

An hour later, his color had returned to normal and he'd stopped throwing up.

"What have we learned?" Brand asked patiently.

"On a planet that goes back and forth between frost and heat, the groundwater is usually very cold." Cooper chattered. "And when you're in an exotic locale, check the water quality first."

"And?"

"Big fish find toes tasty."

"Try saying that fast three times." She smirked and tucked the space blanket around him warmly. "So, Buck Rogers, what was all that about, exactly?"

"Eh." Cooper sighed, mad at himself. "Nothing very profound. I hadn't been for a swim since I was nine years old. My family told me we were moving inland, to get away from the coastline. I knew why, of course; I could watch the news. There was an Aquatic Center in my town. They had a closing down sale, of sorts. Everyone was allowed to come in for free, before the quarantine went into effect. I begged my family to take me there. They didn't want to, but I forced them into it." He sighed. "The place was empty. Even for free, nobody wanted to chance swimming in open water after... Well, after."

Amelia nodded. The Bio-Blasts had been the closing shot of the War.

"Turns out they were right to stay away. The swimming pool gave mom dysentery. She didn't last long after that." He didn't look at her, his expression mostly blank. "Last time I ever went to a swimming pool. And after that, it was illegal to swim in any open water; clean or not."

Amelia winced.  _What a terrible thing for a nine year old to carry guilt for._  She squeezed his shoulder in solidarity. "Last time I went swimming was the reservoir near Lazarus Base. They decided it was too risky to try drinking from it any more. A year later, they announced the danger was past, but we didn't care, because the base had switched to recycling tech. It was our dry run for the Lazarus missions. 100% water purification. We knew it worked because we drank and washed in it for almost five years. The night of the first Lazarus launch, we all got drunk at the celebration party, I woke up in the reservoir. I'm lucky I passed out while floating face up." She smirked. "And that I didn't drift too far from my clothes."

"I would have invited you to come for a swim with me." He grinned. "But I didn't have a swimsuit for you."

"Didn't have one at the reservoir." She said unflappably. "Didn't stop me then, either."

Cooper coughed. "Okay. Warm now."

* * *

They were on their way back to the HAB, when Cooper asked her about it.

"Is it that we can't just make up our minds?" Cooper asked. "Because we just got done telling ourselves that we'd never be satisfied here, and then we're getting all excited about finding things."

"It's not a contradiction." She shook her head. "We wanted to travel to new worlds, but we don't want to stay? We're not colonists, we're explorers. Colonizing is someone else's passion." She nudged his side. "Someone who can see themselves farming."

Cooper burst out laughing.

* * *

They arrived back at the HAB and gave CASE all the details for transcription and transmission.

CASE had kept the greenhouse working, though the harvest hadn't changed that much in four days.

"It's a good sign, that he can handle the delicate work." Amelia commented over dinner that night. "It means we can leave them with the seedlings for planting season."

"He was built for combat support." Cooper offered. "If you can defuse landmines, you can prune tomato bushes."

"Guess so." She took another bite. "This is really good."

"You learn a hundred and one ways to prepare corn for two finicky kids in a kitchen full of dust, you can do anything." Cooper smirked. "First time I've had garlic to cook with."

"Mm." Brand nodded happily. "Garlic is the one thing that thrives in the soil outside as is. Don't know why exactly; but it grows like weeds here." She took a bite. "So if we do decide to leave, we'll be able to take plenty of garlic cloves with us."

"Oh, yes; that's what you want. Two people crammed into an airtight tube with garlic breath for a hundred billion miles."

"Set course for planet of the vampires." CASE put in. Light on.

Brand and Cooper smiled and went back to eating.

"We could do it, you know." He offered after a while. "We could just keep flying. There's no reason to go back, and no reason to stay. Why not go forward?"

Amelia blinked. And then blinked again. "Can... can we do that?"

Everything in a HAB was in reach. Cooper reached back toward the workstation and snatched up one of the tablets, showing her the spreadsheet from their trip. "I've been running the numbers. We can do it. We'd have to refit some of the storage tanks for your vacuum sealed foodstuffs, and figure out power conservation; but that shouldn't be hard. Not compared to what we've done already."

"But the fuel... air and water..." Brand floundered. "There's no way a lander could do it."

"That's the beauty of it." Coop said eagerly. "My ship doesn't have to. You've got a dozen sealed compartments, already designed to snap together as modular sections. Aerodynamics don't matter in space, we could configure them any way we want."

"I do? Where?" Amelia blinked hard. "Endurance? It's still intact? I thought for sure it would have fallen into the atmosphere by now!"

"I took a closer look at her when we came into orbit. A few breaches in the hull, but she's still in one piece. We patch the leaks, resupply her; hook up both our landing craft. With a gravity drive and a fully stocked greenhouse, we've upgraded Endurance's range and speed by a thousand fold."

"We'd never get the greenhouse into orbit. And to make repairs, we'd need the lab  _and_  the workshop. How do you plan to do that?"

"Workshop and Lab have soft-shell. We break them down, and move them into the Ranger. TARS and CASE have dug out Wolf's Lander, and its hull is intact. That's two rooms we can re-purpose. We take them up, transfer everything we need into the Endurance and tie them into the docking ports as permanent sections."

"Coop, my Ranger is dry. So is Wolf's Lander." She tried to break it to him gently. "She'll never move again, let alone carry that much weight!"

"Fuel is only used for precision maneuvering." Cooper explained. "Thrust is achieved by Murph's gravity drive. We can  _literally_  make the entire section weightless. Or more than weightless, we could make a fully loaded Ranger  _fall_  into the sky and keep going. Assemble when we get into Zero G."

"Turn the two ships into cargo containers..." She mulled the idea. "That's why I didn't hear your ship coming. There were no retros."

"Humanity has become a space-faring race while we were here. Air and water recycling is close to a hundred percent effective; which is why I could make the trip in such a small ship. I've spent all week trying to figure out how to adapt it to Endurance. I've done the math, we can keep going for  _ _years__. Longer if we take the cryobeds with us!"

Brand looked around their little home, doing the math in her head. "I don't know, Coop. Single hulled section, mounted on foundation and open to atmo for so long? It's not a spacecraft. It was never meant to be an option for spaceflight."

"No, it was meant to be a sealed habitat for long term use on any range of variable hostile environments. Mann lasted years in one of these HABs, surrounded by toxic conditions. Why not a vacuum?" He started moving swiftly around the HAB, exactly the way she had been when giving him the tour. "We lost a Ranger and two Landers. That's three docking ports that we can attach her to. The Drive will give us artificial gravity, whether we spin her or not. She won't need nearly as much structural integrity to handle movement. It's a big job, but..."

"But it would be a big job with a big pay-off." Brand breathed, already sold on the idea. She finally had a mission again. "So, if we manage to turn this thing into a space-worthy rig, where do we go?"

"Gargantua is right there, and now we know... The wormhole is a construct. Another few generations, my great-great-great-grandkids will have built another hundred pathways. We can sleep. We can take the ship and do a slow orbit around Gargantua, let the millennia fold around us, go from MIA to frontier legends... We can see what humanity has become with time and travel across the universe. We can go to earth. We can set the vector to random once we hit the wormhole and just see where in the  _universe_  we end up. And if we don't like it there, we turn around and try our luck again!"

"We'd have to figure out how to refill our air and water tanks, but that shouldn't be hard..." Amelia gave that considerable thought, not moving so much as a blink of her eyes for several seconds. "We can do this." She said, as if in a dream.

Cooper nodded eagerly. "Tell me it doesn't sound like more than you could have hoped for?"

Amelia was still for another thirty seconds, before she erupted from her chair, caught him by the ears and planted a hair-raising kiss square on his mouth.

After a million lifetimes, they broke for air.

"Let's do it!" She agreed, suddenly filled with giddy optimism.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Update: Working on the Companion Fic, I noticed that I'd erred in a few minor points. I named Cooper's wife 'Lois'. That was my mistake. Lois was actually Tom Cooper's Wife. In this fic, it makes no difference. In the companion fic, it's a major plot point. I have now corrected this work.


	3. The Future

**Chapter 3: The Future**

* * *

It took them several weeks. Cooper taught Amelia all about the mechanics and controls of the gravity drives, and she taught him the math behind the principles of it.

Everything they had would have to be redesigned. Sleeping, food production, observation, storage... To make it ready for life as a spaceship, they had to re-pack everything.

Even with two androids, it took a lot of hard work to get the HAB section ready for flight. They spent a whole night debating whether to send the HAB and two spacecraft up one at a time and seal them up after they were weightless in space, or to link the Modules into the right shape on the ground and then lift the whole thing as a single piece.

* * *

"You have not stopped smilin' all night." Cooper observed.

"Neither have you." She pointed out. "This was my favorite part of the Lazarus missions. Designing an interstellar spaceship? Laying out the whole structure, the equipment... We went all night. Me, my dad, the rest of the team. We were debating back and forth for a week. What equipment did we need, was it worth the weight, worth the fuel... The entire mission was laid out in those meetings. I mean, the government gave us a mission plan, held endless meetings and committees, and we finally agreed to it... and then we started building the ship and had to actually do something that mattered."

"What exactly did the government want to do?"

"Same thing they did for a hundred years. Agree to talk about it more after the next election." Brand yawned. "Did they make it to the Starbases?"

"According to my daughter's abridged journals; currently number two on the recommended reading list for humankind, she timed the launch for just that reason. None of the politicians wanted to admit the earth was finished, and they declared that anyone who went up to space would renounce their citizenship. That worked for Murphy, so by the time everyone agreed that earth was dead, the Stations were civilian run, and totally self-sufficient. Nobody could buy their way on board."

"So the majority of ones who got left behind were the ones that couldn't admit there was a problem." Amelia snorted. " I think I just realized how much she got from you. The one thing my dad could never figure out to anyone's satisfaction. Who stays on earth and who gets to launch."

"Gravity Drive. They could take whole cities if they put enough work into it. But a lot of people didn't make it on the bus." He shivered. "I hate the idea that my kid had to do that without me."

There was a quiet moment as they both turned that over in their heads.

"Number two on the reading list, huh?" She smiled at him.

"Our unauthorized biographies hover back and forth between number twelve and fourteen." He sipped.

"What's number one?"

"Cosmos, Carl Sagan." He said without hesitation.

"Really?" Brand brightened at once.

He let her smile for a whole two seconds. "No, not really." He confessed and she swatted him. "Number One was some teen romance about a sparkly alien who snuck aboard a station for the love of a teenage girl."

She snorted.

"So. Rotation gravity, or artificial?" Cooper said, getting them back on topic.

"I like the idea of having Zero-G sections." Amelia offered. "I always sleep better in Zero-G. Better for workspaces to have gravity, though."

"If we spin the ship, we can have both. But it makes our guidance a lot more complicated." He countered.

And so the debates continued. As space-travelers and engineers, it was the most satisfying thing they'd ever done together.

* * *

The season passed. The two of them drew up their plans. They'd decided to keep the same basic shape of the last ship they were on together. The modules would need totally different equipment. The last mission was meant to carry the incubation equipment, and enough supplies to start a colony of infants. For all the damage their ship had taken, they still had the chance to do that.

Band's Ranger was more or less intact, but with little fuel. Cooper's ship didn't have room enough for two people. Just pilot and droid. But Cooper had run the numbers, and they could do it. Her Ranger as a bridge and control room, his Explorer as an engine. It was a century ahead of anything Brand had ever seen, and she took his word that the drive could do it.

The greenhouse was now twice the original size, with the Plan B equipment all to be left behind on the planet.

"We're the first astronauts to have a totally fresh grown diet." Brand said with a smile at him. "Well, the first ones to build their own ship to do it, anyway. You can't seem to get away from farming, but still-"

Cooper chuckled. "Actually, that raises a question." He gestured at the incubation chambers. "What do we do with Plan B? Humanity escaped earth, but..."

"There's still the matter of this place to consider." CASE put in. "Plan B may be irrelevant now, but if you guys take a journey around the black hole for a thousand years, you might need resupply one day. And if earth ever did send a recovery, someone should tell them what happened. The samples in Dr Brand's greenhouse will be ready with one more season to try their luck outside."

"It'll take at least that long to get the rest of the HAB ready." Brand offered. "If we were planning to start a new crop once we got into space..."

"I've run it four times. We'll have a much better chance of seedlings, even freshly planted ones going into orbit, than we will hoping the ripening plants survive the trip."

"So there's your solution." CASE finished. "Harvest your latest crop, preserve it, and plant a new crop before launch. Meanwhile, all the gene-plants that Dr Brand is cultivating will be planted outside, and tended by one of us. If it works, you'll have trees planted and growing."

"You guys want to stay behind?" Cooper seemed stunned.

"Not exactly, but there are benefits to earth, and to you if someone maintains the camp and the crop as much as possible. There are redundant systems for the vacuum release. One of us can harvest and preserve another three or four crops before needing a recharge. If you could leave one of the turbines, it could easily be adapted to slow charge one of us."

"And what use would we have in space for windmills, anyway?" Cooper smiled ruefully.

"TARS and I have been talking about it. He'll be the one to stay behind."

"He will?" Cooper and Brand said in surprised unison.

"Sure." TARS was unconcerned. "And just so you know, I will be changing my name to 'Machine God-Emperor of Planet TARS' once you leave." His light came on.

* * *

"Amelia?" He asked her suddenly one day. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Sure, Coop."

"You knew that the odds of getting pregnant were one in four. If I hadn't shown up... What were you planning to do?"

Amelia swallowed hard. "I was going to try again." She said.  _Why am I nervous to admit that?_

He didn't continue the conversation, and they never spoke of it again.

* * *

The work continued until there was nothing left for them to do on solid ground. Eventually, they had to get the Endurance ready to take them back.

"I can fly it up." Cooper told her, unconcerned. "I'll be back before Dinner."

"Fantastic, but I'm still going with you."

"Brand, we've run the schedule. Perihelion is only a few weeks away, and if we want to make it out before the black hole gets any closer..."

"We both know that from this side of the planet, its more important what time of  _day_  we launch than what time of year." She argued.

"And most of what's left is going to be done in orbit. Recon and Assessment is a one person job. We stick to the schedule and we can get this done in a week and-"

"And I'm going with you!" She repeated.

Cooper paused, looking back at her. She set her jaw and looked ready to attack him over it.

He suddenly softened. "I'm coming right back." He said gently.

"I go with you, you won't have to worry about it. And neither will I." She ground out.

"Only one seat on the Ranger. We haven't retrofit a second seat yet."

She just looked at him. After a few moments, her eyes started to get bigger and bigger.

Cooper came closer and put a hand on each shoulder, bending close to look in her eyes. "I'm coming right back, Amelia. We'll be on comms the whole time."

"I know you wouldn't just fly off, Coop." She nodded. "But things go wrong up there. We  _of all people_  know that. Space is a very final place. And if you get killed up there, you sure as hell better take me with you."

Coop just looked at her. "That's sweet, in a sick kinda way."

"You have no  _idea_ , Coop." She said quietly. "Alone on a whole planet? It's... oppressive. I don't know how else to say it. It's like being alone in an empty house and the silence is just pressing in on you. Imagine that from a whole  _planet_ , and you'll have some idea what it's like. I won't go through that again. And if it means we miss Perihelion, then I can live with an extra two weeks in space."

Cooper looked at her for another few moments. "Well then. We'd better get another seat in the Ranger, huh?"

And for a moment, for just a split second, she loved him more deeply than she'd ever loved anyone.

* * *

Having both of them go changed the schedule enough that they upgraded their first spaceflight from Recon to actual construction. TARS was kind enough to send her the video feed of the launch. Seen from the outside, it was like a magic trick. The two ships, just raising up into the sky.

The weather had cooperated with them for once, and there had been little turbulence. Amelia had felt her stomach drop as the ship rose, but there was none of the pressure that came with retro boosters.

And she saw the other HAB sections begin their ascent too. They had no attitude control, so they started to turn. Amelia grit her teeth, wondering how badly her greenhouse was being tossed around.

But once again, she couldn't help the giddy thrill that went through her when she felt the gravity shift from planetary to artificial. She could tell. They were beyond Negative Return.

They were back in space.

Amelia looked back at the viewport as Cooper collected the compartments with their landing claws. She couldn't even make out the camp, or the hills where she'd been stargazing with Cooper, or the patch where she'd started grass growing... If she strained her eyes, she could just barely make out a line that may have been the canyon where he went swimming, but it was all so... tiny.

For all the fun they'd had talking about how they had a whole world, they'd barely seen any of it.

And then she saw Endurance. Somehow, the old girl was still in the sky, even with a small cloud of debris following her.  _Gravity again._  She thought to herself.  _Just enough gravity to keep the particles close to the ship._ "The cloud of sharp things is going to make it hard to work outside."

"I can pulse the gravity generators, clear away the debris." Cooper said easily.

"Really?"

"Well... I assume so. I can't think of a reason why I couldn't." He shrugged. "I was... I mean, the one thing they weren't going to give me was a job as an astronaut. I've done plenty of engineering from textbooks, but-"

"You're just making this up as you go along, aren't you?"

"You just described my life in one poetic phrase." Cooper worked the controls. "We'll have to go Zero-G if I'm going to use the drive for a different field."

Amelia checked her straps. "Go ahead."

A moment later, she was floating against her chair. Her stomach tried to climb her throat, and she gulped it back down again. "Can I ask you something?" She said, mostly to distract herself.

"Sure."

"Why doesn't anyone call you 'Joe'?" I mean, it's your name. My dad, your dad... Every time someone other than your kids spoke to you; they all said 'Coop' and not 'Joe'."

Cooper chuckled. "My first name came from an estranged uncle that my dad was desperate to make peace with. The result was another massive fight between my uncle and father that nearly demolished several small villages. Then, when my Aunt Josie came to live with us when I was two years old; it became a massive source of confusion for a family trying to teach me new words."

Amelia laughed delightedly. "So they decided to change your name?"

"Dad tried to get it legally changed, but Aunt Jo was ready to strangle him over that one. And after this long, I don't mind. In fact, I like it more than 'Joe'. I've always been 'Coop' to my friends."

"Is that what I am?" She smirked, and then the smile fell off her face instantly. "I mean... aren't we?"

He was about to answer when an alarm started beeping on his console.

"What's that?"

"Proximity alarm." He hissed, working the controls. "Endurance shifted when I pulsed the debris away. She's falling to the atmosphere!"

Amelia swore. If the ship fell, they'd never leave the planet. "Can you catch her?!"

"If I can dock, then I can extend the drive field around the whole hull, just like we planned. But she's going to hit air in a few minutes! Detach the modules! We'll have to come back for them."

Amelia hit the necessary control, but she wasn't even worried. She remembered the last time he'd had to make a daring, downright impossible docking maneuver.

* * *

Cooper had caught the Endurance, just as the air started to heat up around them. For all the talk about how it was a one person job, she stayed behind to man the Gravity Drive while he quickly unstrapped himself and ran to the docking ring. If the Ranger came loose of the ship, they were both dead. Once he was sure of the seals, he went into Endurance itself, using the leftover fuel to get them back up into stable orbit.

"You need to kill the gravity drive before the retros fire, and have it on again as soon as the tank runs dry." He told her over comms.

"It was on fumes when I left." She called back.

"Then we better time it  _perfectly_."

Weeks of teaching each other things had given them a near-telepathic sense of what the other would do, and they had arrested the fall in a few minutes. "We're clear!"

"Say it." She said, as soon as the walls of the ship had stopped groaning.

"It was a two person job." He conceded.

"On the plus side, the debris is all gone." Amelia grinned. "We're cleared for EVA."

* * *

Welding wasn't an option in space. There would be no ignition in a vacuum, and doing so in a pressurized high-oxygen environment was wildly dangerous.

Seals were done chemically. They both suited up and went outside. Moving the modules into place was tricky enough in Zero G, and it took both of them to put it precisely in place against the hatchway seal. Brand started applying the adhesive strips where the metal met, and Cooper added bolts and screws to provide strength.

"Ready here." Brand called. "You?"

"I'm clear. Fire when ready."

Brand pulled the tab on the sealant strips, and the chemical reaction fired, sizzling the two metal panels together, the metal flash-melting, and then hardening in the sub-zero cold.

"In the old days, we could have just used duct tape." Cooper called over with a grin.

She almost smiled. "On a spacecraft?"

"On anything." Cooper said solemnly. "Duct Tape is the crowning achievement of the human race."

"Said the intergalactic time traveler." Brand laughed.

* * *

They headed back inside. There was air enough, but the mix wasn't right. The controls were still damaged, but all the sections left open to space were preserved by vacuum.

Cooper got to work repairing the guidance and power systems, and Amelia the life support. She'd forgotten how tricky it was to move in Zero-G.

The living quarters were trashed, but the science sections were intact. The greenhouse had made the trip fairly intact, and they'd decided to have gravity in the sections.

"Amelia, I'm ready to switch over the Drive Systems to my ship. Orient for gravity."

Amelia rotated herself over so that her feet were pointed the right way. "Ready!"

"In three, two..."

Amelia felt the shift in her guts as she gently floated 'down'. The ship suddenly had a 'down' and that meant the room had floor and a ceiling. The dirt all dropped snugly into their pots again, and the plastic sheeting she had laid over the dirt settled; ready to be re-purposed for repairs. Working with gravity was much faster, and they'd set it all up to float again when they went back to the planet for the rest of their supplies.

"Okay, I'll get started on the Environmental systems." Amelia reported.

She made her way back through the ship, through the living quarters...

The beds were trashed. On the mission, they had spent most of their time in cryo, or working, but there were cots, set into the wall. Four of them. Except the Living Quarters had taken most of the debris damage. There had been holes punched through everything.

"Coop, I think we're going to have to clear out the entire Section, use one of our compartments from the surface. Clearing this out is going to be a big job." She reported. "One that can wait until we get moving."

"I think so." He agreed. "Plus, we clear that whole section out, we can turn it into an extension on the greenhouse. We're gonna need every inch of space."

Amelia was looking around the ship. "We are, aren't we?" Seeing it again, she realized she'd been remembering it as bigger. It was going to be a snug fit. "What do you think about adjusting the gravity drive so that some of the sections are Zero-G?"

"We ran the numbers. Won't work in the ring, but the center sections can handle it. Problem is, those are the sections already built. Can't use the ceilings in Compartments as extra floor space." He grunted into the radio, working on something. "Don't worry, we've got room."

"Yeah, but very little extra." She reported. "Once we move the bed out of here and into a new compartment, there won't be much left in here that's usabl-" She caught herself, mortified.

"Bed? Singular?" Cooper almost stammered.

"Well, yeah." Amelia cleared her throat. "I mean, there's only one left that's intact. Everything in here is scrap metal."

"Oh. Right. For a moment I thought you meant-" Cooper cleared his throat loudly.

Amelia's heart was suddenly beating so loud she was sure her bio-monitors were setting off an alarm somewhere. "Oh. Right."

"I... had planned to include two cots with the gear we were bringing up when we left." Cooper offered. "But, as you say..."

_As I say... what?_  The unfinished sentence kept spinning around in her mind. She hadn't exactly said anything.  _Was he asking for an opinion? Was he asking about ship design, or about... us?_

"Well, it's not like we haven't doubled up before, and we  _do_  need all the room we can-" Her mouth shut fast.  _Did I really just say that?_

"Uh, what was that, Brand? Interference on the line."

He was calling her 'Brand' again. She hadn't even noticed that he hadn't called her that in days. "Sorry, Cooper; I must have missed something. I'll do a diagnostic on the comms."

They didn't speak of it again until they got back to the surface.

* * *

It was strange, and just a bit claustrophobic, being in space again. For all the hardship of a desert planet, there was wide open space and big skies in every direction. Amelia hadn't minded it at all, but the 'oops' with Cooper had thrown the situation into sharp focus. If they went back into space, there'd be no chance at keeping their distance from each other.

They returned to the planet, one last time.

* * *

Night had fallen by the time their work was finished. They'd leave in the morning. Amelia stayed outside for a while, looking up at the night sky. Her breath was misting again, the cold biting her skin. She enjoyed it. By the next night, she'd be in a climate controlled tin can. She might never feel cold air again.

Cooper came out to join her, and held out a flask. "Traditionally, you toast a maiden voyage. Endurance is close enough to a new ship to deserve a drink."

"Cheers." She took the flask and gulped down a mouthful. "What is this?"

"Europan Beer."

"Seriously?"

"Made and brewed in water from a Jovian Moon." Cooper grinned, and took the flask back for his own sip. "What are you thinking?"

Amelia was still looking up. "Stars don't twinkle in space. The atmosphere makes the starlight do that. We may not see stars twinkle again for a while." She took another sip and handed the flask back. "How about you? What are you thinking?"

Cooper sat next to her, close enough to wrap them both in a space blanket again. "When we were out at the ridge, the night of Aphelion? I looked at you when you were looking at the stars. It felt like I was seeing... I don't know, the real you. Without the mission, or the doomsday clock, or the isolation. I felt like I only first met you that night."

Amelia had the strangest urge to break down crying, but smiled instead. "I had the exact same thought about you."

They looked back up at the stars.

* * *

Amelia and Cooper spent their time putting their equipment into preservation. There was no indication they'd be back, but it just made sense to give their equipment the best chance to survive without them.

Amelia had drilled TARS in how to handle the Patch. In miles of wasteland, there was now one square of green, wavy grass growing. Trees and bushes would come next, and if they survived, they'd drop seeds. Her Gene-Hacked plants could survive the heat, and handle living in a low water environment. The nightly condensation would water the plants, and their natural ability to propagate themselves would take care of the rest.

"Now, once the planting seasons are done, the most you'll have to do is dig irrigation and protect them from harsh weather." Brand told TARS. "You've got enough preservation supplies to dry-seal two seasons worth of harvest. Every season, take the oldest and replace it with fresh grown, and use the discards as compost."

"Understood."

"Now, what about the trees?"

"The seedlings have adapted to the cold, and there's no sign of attack to their leaves or roots." The machine reported. "I will continue to add bio-matter to the surrounding area."

"In a thousand years, this might be a forest." She murmured to herself. "So, you ready for this? I... worry about you staying behind alone."

"I'm a machine. To pass the time I calculate Pi to the forty millionth decimal point, and see how many books I can read and comprehend at the same time." TARS promised. "If you ever come back, I'll have dinner waiting."

"And speaking of Dinner..." Cooper said grandly, coming up behind them. "Y'know the best part about leaving in the morning?"

"We can stuff ourselves stupid on food we can't take with us?" She guessed with a smile.

"And we don't even have to do the dishes!"

* * *

They were leaving in the morning, but didn't talk much about it. It was an odd feeling, like there was something they weren't talking about.

And they both knew what it was.

With most of the structure packed up, they were back in the same room. Cooper slept across the aisle from her, but neither of them were sleeping.

"I can't think of any way to ease into it." Cooper said finally.

"Should we..." Amelia said without thinking, and caught herself when she realized she didn't know how to finish the sentence. "I mean... This time tomorrow, we're working again."

"We've been working this whole time."

"You know what I mean." She said quietly.

Cooper started breathing a little harder. "It's... been a while."

"Been a while for me too. Applicator Kits don't count." She reminded him.

"No, not that. I mean,  _yes_ ; that. But I meant it's been a while since I've had one of these conversations. The last time I ended up proposing, and that was a good few... Decades ago."

"I know we aren't exactly like that,  _but_..."

"But." Cooper agreed, as if that explained everything. "Amelia, we can't just be amicable. If we're really going to be explorers again? It's going to be a lifestyle. We can't just be coworkers. It was this side of a  _day_  ago we finally decided what you were even going to  _call_  me."

She nodded. "I know. Look, I don't know that we'll ever be..."  _ _'in love'__ she mentally filled it in without saying it aloud. "...but after my dad lied and Mann lied and..."

"I lied once too."

"That's different. You did it as an act of self-sacrifice. They did it because they couldn't face the end of the road." She told him. "You're right. This is going to be a big chunk of our lives, and we didn't even discuss if we wanted to do it  _together_. But we didn't even blink before doing it. Like it or not, whether we talked about it or not, we made the choice weeks ago."

"I guess we did." Cooper said, and she could hear him smiling. "We've had quite a journey, you and me. When I made it back to Sol, I couldn't stay there, because I knew the journey wasn't over, even if the mission  _was_."

"Well, if it's not too late to say it? If you lined up a hundred other astronauts; I'm positive that I'd still pick you to do this with." Amelia said honestly. "We  _have_  had a journey, you and me. And now that we've decided it's not over yet, I can't do this with anyone else."

"I know. I need you too." Cooper said quietly.

__Need__ _._ Amelia considered the word in her head. It was the only one that fit. She knew the multiple levels that human beings needed each other. They needed social interaction, positive reinforcement, communal goals, emotional support... physical affection.

But she'd had real love before, and this didn't feel anything like that. And he'd been in love before, and that was long gone too.

Amelia made a decision, and slipped out of her bunk, coming across to join him. He didn't hesitate to make room for her.

"Is it just that we don't have any other options?" Cooper asked as their arms went around each other.

"Do you ever plan to go back to earth?" She asked quietly.

Silence.

"No." Cooper admitted. "I mean, we probably should at some point, but I can't say I..."

"...feel the need to." She finished for him. "Neither do I."

Silence. He started stroking her hair gently, and she started stroking her fingertips over his arms.

"In all the movies, when there's only one woman, and one man left somewhere; they inevitably fall in love, or at least start sleeping together." Brand said softly. "But is that just what happens when there's nobody else, or is that just what happens in movies?"

"Amelia, it's not that I'm not interested." He whispered.

"I know." She admitted. "I've seen you glancing over when you think I can't see. I... I look too." She breathed deep. "This whole thing has been built around what we need, more than what we feel. And we need each other."

"It's not the worst reason, is it?" He murmured.

Amelia licked her lips. "I just don't want it to be like we're  _obligated_  to hook up since we're alone together for so long."

"Me neither." He said softly. "If we were both teenagers, maybe we wouldn't care. But I've had the real thing, and I couldn't settle for less"

"Ne neither. It's not like rationing out food, and setting up a work schedule. I spent so long trying to convince myself I could handle being the only human being in the universe." She whispered. "But we're still human, and humans need each other." She let out a shaky breath. "And... It's not lack of options. Because I have no need to go back to Earth, but I need you."

"And I was able to leave earth forever without looking back." He returned. "And I don't think I could do that for anyone else alive."

It wasn't a statement of true love, but it was the most feeling they'd conjured for anyone in quite some time.

"Have you noticed, the robots seem to be elsewhere right now?" Cooper said against her hair.

She smiled and shifted slowly, moving over him. She slid up the cot a little, to look him in the eyes. She was almost two feet shorter than him. They didn't kiss, they just lay against each other, almost nose to nose, just gazing into each other's eyes. "They're better at picking up the emotional subtext than we are."

"So it seems." Cooper agreed, and they just kept staring into each other. "So, um... How long has it been, exactly? Because we may want to take this slow."

"Little presumptuous, aren't you?" She teased. "I mean, just because we're in a bed together right now, pretty much on top of each other, debating how needy we are and how many cots we'd need for the rest of our lives, and we're a bazillion light years from anyone else... You just assume something's going to happen?"

Pause. They both cracked up.

Amelia slid down to lay her head against his chest. His arms went around her cozily, and they settled in for sleep.

"I'll bring two cots." Cooper murmured. "They don't weigh much, and if nothing else, we can use them for bench space."

He was giving her an out. A way to put off the conversation for another time, and she appreciated it. "Good idea."

She felt him shift again, half under her; and she knew that he was being affected by their proximity and the conversation. And she had to admit; she was too. If he pushed a little, she probably would have been all for it...  _How long has it been for him?_ She found herself wondering.

He was thinking the same thing. "All the time you've spent dedicated to the mission... How long has it been since you put your life and what you wanted for yourself anywhere as a priority?"

"A while." She admitted. "So. Friends?"

"More."

"Teammates?"

"More?"

"Partners?"

"At least."

Long silence. She kept running her fingertips over his heartbeat, and he kept stroking his fingers along her spine.

"Coop... This is going to happen sooner or later, isn't it?"

"Yeah." He said with easygoing certainty.

"Good." She drawled against his chest. "You in a hurry?"

His fingers froze at the edge of her shirt, and then relaxed. "Not... no." He settled finally. "Because there's one thing that hasn't changed. We've got time."

Amelia felt a little disappointed, despite herself; but she settled into him for sleep, sighing contentedly. They'd get there. Whether love would follow was a far more interesting question, but they had all the time in the world.

* * *

It was their second launch in two days, but there was a feeling of incredible finality to it. Amelia had hugged TARS tightly, despite the fact that she couldn't get her arms around him.

They docked with the Endurance, and went to see if the seals they made had held overnight. They had. Amelia took her suit helmet off gratefully, glad to have a ship with gravity. She changed back into her jumpsuit. She felt a subtle shiver, aware that he was looking at her. It would have made her uncomfortable once, but not it made her feel better. Even when she couldn't see him, she knew she wasn't alone, and wouldn't be again.

"One advantage to using the gravity drive instead of rotation?" Cooper whispered in her ear. "The stars don't spin."

He lead her by the hand, over to the window. The stars didn't pinwheel, the way they did when they left earth for the first time. Amelia looked outside, and gazed down at what had been, for a while at least, her own personal planet.

The pale golden world turned below them very slowly, stretching across the entire lower half of the view. Half a world, spread out beneath them. Even without forests and jungles, it was an impressive sight. The two of them gazed down at it for what felt like a hundred years.

"You know, I heard what you said to TARS. You may be right. If we decide to make a loop around Gargantua before we make for the wormhole, there's a chance that we could get back in sight of the planet. We could find that a forest has grown while we were away." Cooper suggested lightly.

"Depends how good a botanist I am." Amelia grinned. "But no. Time to stop looking back."

* * *

They came the long way around Gargantua and lined up to enter the wormhole as time flowed fast around them. Everything that Cooper knew about the Sol System had faded into history again.

The gravity from the drive and from the black hole fought each other for a moment before the drive compensated, and Amelia felt her insides do a complete flip as 'down' and 'up' disagreed with each other for a moment.

She could see the wormhole in view, unchanged by the passage of centuries. "So, that little maneuver cost us another few centuries." Cooper said brightly. "I'm told that by now, the Wormhole will have been opened up to include paths to a thousand other star systems."

"Wonder which one we'll land in?" Amelia said rhetorically. "Wormhole alignment in fifteen seconds. Say goodbye to Gargantua."

Cooper released the controls, and they rode the wake, as the walls started to morph back and forth around them. The world of three dimensions had been overruled.

"Never get used to this!" Cooper called.

Amelia laughed, delighted. It was like being in a funhouse.

And then, amazingly, they had company.

There was a ripple in the air, moving gently through their viewport. They had seen it before, on their first trip through the wormhole.

"Was that you?" Amelia asked suddenly, grabbing Coop's hand compulsively.

"No, I don't think so." Cooper stammered out. "It's..."

The 'Bulk Being' hovered in front of Cooper for a while, and then moved to Amelia for a moment, before hovering between them, where their hands were joined across the console.

Cooper knew instantly. "Murph!"

The Bulk Being wavered for a second, before it floated back toward Amelia's side of the ship, on it's way out.

Amelia leaned over, closer to it, so that he wouldn't hear. "I promise, Murph; I'll take care of him."

And then they were alone again.

Cooper was staring at her, buggy eyed. "What if that was it?"

"What do you mean?"

"Murphy was the one that cracked the Gravity Equation. If she built the Wormhole, or the Tesseract, then it means she must have moved in fifth dimensional space too. What if the reason she sent me to find you was because she saw us here together in the future, hand in hand?"

"You think that was young Murph, firing up the Tesseract and looking across the future to find us here? Another Bootstrap Paradox?" Amelia considered. "Does it matter anymore?"

"No."

"Would... would you have come back for me anyway?"

"...yes."

"Then, I guess I'm very glad I met Murphy." Amelia declared. "She saved the world at the cost of the two of us, and she just settled accounts by saving us too."

* * *

The walls stopped warping, and the sky had back back into regular normal space. The nearest star was bright yellow, like Sol. And nearby, a gas giant, bigger than Jupiter, with rings. And at least two moons. The nearest moon was a bright and vibrant evergreen. The kind that came from forests.

"So." Amelia said brightly once they were done gazing. "Set course for the nearest planet, Pilot."

"Well, that sounded distressingly like an order." He smirked.

"Well, I'm ranking officer on this ship." She reminded him.

"On the  _Endurance_." Cooper shot back playfully. "This baby is powered by  _ _my__  ship, which makes me Captain."

"A ship you  _ _stole__ , which makes you a pirate." She couldn't stop smiling.

"And technically you declared  _Endurance_  lost, which makes it salvage, which makes you a castaway." He was grinning too.

"Oh yes, this is going to be a fun roadtrip." CASE drawled.

"Space Pirate Captain, Castaway Queen and a smart-cracking robot." Amelia burst out laughing. "If we ever  _do_  go back to earth, we've got to pitch someone this idea as a TV show."

Cooper laughed with her. They had chosen her ship as the control room, partly because it was easier to detach the other as a landing craft, but mostly because it had side by side chairs. He hadn't let go of her hand since entering the wormhole.

Whether they stayed or not, they would face the next chapter of their story side by side, hand in hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there it is.
> 
> Read and Review!

**Author's Note:**

> Read And Review!


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